I ate it so you don't have to: Haggis

Haggis is as much a cartoon character as it is an actual food item. Conceptually, it sounds like a fake recipe for someone mocking the - for lack of a better word - iffy culinary record of Scotland and its neighboring cultural hubs (looking at you Ireland and England). As a result, the idea of taking the sheep's heart, liver and lungs, shoving it into the stomach and boiling it seems only moderately insane.

Haggis also carries a bit of a mythical status in the U.S. over its use of sheep's lung in the offal (culinary term for organs 'n stuff). I, like many people, first learned of the dish in that scene in "Armageddon" (the second-greatest movie ever made) where the guy explains the dish to a psychoanalyst as part of his evaluation right before Michael Clarke Duncan starts to break down in tears.

Despite the grizzly allure that comes with playing "Inception" with a sheep's organ, the dish has been banned in the U.S. since 1971. More specifically, the U.S. ban is on the consumption of sheep's lung, a key ingredient. Technically, you could make haggis without the lungs. However, that would likely be considered culinary heresy on the same level of cooking up tuna before putting it in sushi. (The U.S. has also had a ban on the import of all British lamb products as a result of the mad cow disease scare. This does not make things easier.)

British officials have asked as recently as late June for the U.S. to lift the ban, but to no avail. In America, sheep's lung is officially classified as an "inedible item." Until then, we Americans can only make do with vain attempts to emulate the traditional recipe legally.

(Note: I'm sure that there's a Scottish black market out there where you can get a wiry, old man who grew up near Edinburgh to make it for you. If you know this man, let me know. I have to talk to him about something completely unrelated to authentic haggis.)

Haggis

Since the traditional recipe can't be widely distributed in the U.S., I had to make do with a legal adapted version from Scottish Gourmet USA, a very fine website (based in New Jersey, not Scotland) that will send you one pound of mail-order haggis with surprising speed for $14 (plus shipping).

The result is a tube of meat 'n stuff, which comes with the suggestion to pair it with the traditional mashed potatoes and mashed turnips. I obliged with the mashed potatoes. However, lacking the inventory of (or the desire to eat) turnips, I substituted that with the only other Scottish food or drink I had available: an Innis & Gunn oak-aged ale.

Although it's probably much more complicated to make an illegal Scottish meat zeppelin, the cooking process turned out to be pretty straightforward: re-heat in the oven in a water-filled pan covered in foil at 350 for 45 minutes.

I was kind of hoping I'd need a flamethrower and a broad sword.

So what does it taste like?

As weird as the concept of haggis is, it's still meat. Meat is delicious, so it shouldn't be too big a surprise that the legal iteration of haggis is actually pretty good.

Any reservations over eating the beef liver in the product don't have much staying power, as all the meat is ground to the point where any individual animal parts are indistinguishable. Still, the distinct meat texture and fibers are still present. It's not artificially smooth, either. You can see the structure of the meat - it's just very finely ground.

After you release the meat and oats from the plastic food sarcophagus, what remains is an almost crumbly, meatloaf-like product with surprising softness. Despite the comparisons to a sausage, there's zero snap or bite in slicing or eating it. The haggis cuts easily enough, but also falls apart. This makes it very easy to eat. So even if you can't get it in perfect slices, you can still get some crumbly bits that play well together with the mashed potatoes. Overall, it's like a denser version of shepherd's pie filling.

The most prominent element of the haggis is the oats, which come off almost like quinoa. Those little oat bits present throughout the entire roll add another textural layer to what would otherwise be a squishy log of mystery meat. (It was also helps deal with the fact that, when it's cooked, the whole thing kind of looks like a steaming poop.)

Flavor-wise, the entire profile is pretty mellow, with a warm, earthy spice flavor present behind the meat. You can taste the lamb, but there's also another dimension that comes stronger in the aftertaste with the additional flavors added. The flavors are all balanced, with no rogue organs throwing the whole thing out of whack. That's to be expected, considering how finely processed and ground the whole thing is (which is a good thing).

The final word

Despite the fact that this is, in fact, America, I'm still barred by law from eating a bunch of sheep's organs stuffed into another organ (Thanks, Obama).

In the absence of the real thing, though, you can still get something that tastes pretty good. Whether that has to do with the lack of heart/lung is a whole other issue. But in the meantime, I'm content with my log of oats and sheep stuff.